Literary Reading Through the Eyes of Future Teachers

A Comparative Study Between 1st and 3rd Year Students of The Bachelor's Degree "Primary Education Teacher" of The University of Barcelona

Abstract

Literary reading plays a fundamental role in the classroom as a didactic instrument that favours academic learning and individual and social development of students. Teachers have the responsibility to motivate students towards the achievement of certain objectives and their corresponding benefits, thus becoming an ideal literary mediator. At the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Universities proposed a reform of the university degrees in Early Childhood and Primary Education which affects directly to the specific didactics, including Didactics of Language and Literature. This circumstance, together with the lack of rewarding personal experiences at school, led us to design a study to highlight the need for quality university education by comparing the beliefs, representations, and knowledge about literary reading of two groups of future teachers. Through questionnaires and with the support of two interviews, we have observed that the beliefs, representations, and knowledge of the students who have studied a specific subject of Children’s and Young People’s Literature develop positively and offer interesting results. The beliefs of the teaching team of the future have an affective component justified in their own past experiences, but also a cognitive component that is fed by good training, as is well demonstrated in the results obtained, seeing how third-year students having taken a specific subject focused on children's literature stand out above the first-year students. who have only attended an introductory subject, in essential points.